Making use of the formerly secret archives of the Soviet government, interviews, and first-hand personal experiences, Nathaniel Davis describes how the Russian Orthodox Church hung on the brink of institutional extinction twice in the past sixty-five years.

The Council of Florence was an attempt to unite the Orthodox Church with the Church of Rome in the last years of the Byzantine Empire. Its history is of great importance for all who seek to understand issues confronting the Orthodox Church today. Ostroumoff’s history of the Council of Florence was published in 1847 and translated into English shortly thereafter. This is a reprint of that rare English edition, to which has been added Epistles of Metropolitan Philaret.

This story of profound spiritual transformation demonstrates how a bishop and a local monastery turned a village riddled by scandal into one of the most spiritually vibrant towns in all of Greece. The book covers the political history and religious character of the region of Nikopolis, from time of the Apostle Paul in 63 AD to the arrival of Bishop Meletios in 1980.

The descent of the Holy Fire at the Tomb of Christ every Holy Saturday is the only miraculous event in human history which has taken place each year on the same day for more than one thousand years. Covering a period of eight centuries, from the 9th to the 16th century, this book assembles historical accounts of the celebrated event.

This book is a critical study of the interaction between Russian Church and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At a time of rising nationalist movement throughout Europe, Orthodox patriots advocated for the place of the Church as a unifying force, central to the identity and purpose of the burgeoning, yet increasingly religiously diverse Russian Empire. Their views were articulated in a variety of ways. Bishops such as Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky—a founding hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia—and other members of the clergy expressed their vision of Russia through official publications (including ecclesiastical journals), sermons, the organization of pilgrimages and the canonization of saints. On the other hand, religious intellectuals (such as the famous philosopher Vladimir Soloviev and the controversial former-Marxist Sergey Bulgakov) promoted what was often a variant vision of the nation through the publication of books and articles. Even the once persecuted Old Believers, emboldened by a religious toleration edict of 1905, sought to claim a role in national leadership. And many—in particularly famous painter Mikhail Vasnetsov—looked to art and architecture as a way of defining the religious ideals of modern Russia.